“There’s a significant amount of interest, across the board, in all types of industries,” says Uma Challa, senior director in the research and advisory group at management consulting company Gartner. “Most of our clients are in the discovery phase .”
For customer service, that’s been helpful for the ability to quickly scan and analyze mountains of data. Generative AI is set to significantly improve the quality and personalized nature of those answers, expanding the number of customer queries that could be handled by chatbots, according to the McKinsey report.
The AI listened in on the agents’ conversations with customers — small- and medium-sized business owners who needed to troubleshoot problems with their software — and provided suggestions on how to respond.In an example of how that could work in practice, the Stanford and MIT researchers suggested a scenario where a customer calls in because they can’t log into their system.
Collins thinks it will be about six months or so before AI-based assistants are unleashed to deal directly with customers. “You need good routing capabilities. If the model doesn’t understand the specific type of question, how seamlessly does it transfer to a human agent?” says Gartner’s Challa. “Some of those issues have to be worked out.”Without that, AI won’t help prevent that frustrating experience of getting bounced from question to question and department to department without getting your problem solved.